I agree. I can't believe anyone would go into that profession these days given the administrators, parents and politicians with whom they will have to deal these days.
As though no one else in the world has to deal with difficult people at work? Often for minimum wage or scarcely better and no benefits? And sometimes without even paid time off (e.g. contractors and day laborers and lots of hourly employees)? Please tell me you're being facetious and I completely missed the point.
Are those people judged based on their own performance or on the performance of their untouchable co-workers? That is what is being proposed when politicians of all stripes discuss merit pay and linking evaluations to testing. It's absolutely assinine to think that is a legitimate manner of evaluation when the student faces little to no repercussions for their own failures, but their teachers do.
We already evaluate teachers in this country, with usual policy being that they are evaluated 2-4 times per year depending on the district. Sometimes those evaluations are done well, by administrators who take their jobs seriously and want to ensure quality people remain in all positions on their campuses. Sometimes those evaluations are done by an administrator who is relatively clueless and is only interested in promotion through the system even if by false means, and sometimes they are done by administrators who are friends with the teacher, who go to the same church, their kids are in the same Boy Scout troop, or who has been a mortal enemy of the teacher since they each were 7. Just as in every profession, human resource management in education is hit and miss, but that's not necessarily the fault of the teachers.
On edit- By the way, I am not a teacher, though I have represented both teachers and administrators and I agree with some of the points you and others have made here. I would like a year long school calendar, more stringent requirements for secondary educators, higher pay to attract more candidates to the field. I've seen a teacher who didn't know the difference between its and it's, while I had a math teacher who could have worked at NASA.
Which one of those is going to reach the students and inspire them to greatness? We're talking about humans, in a highly subjective field in which so many variables intersect. Your guess is as good as mine, but the correct answer is probably both- different students, for different reasons at different times. Education is not a business, not a science and can't be reduced to numbers like the production of widgets. I agree with the poster who likened it to porn, because great or even good teaching is also not subject to identification by some formula or matrix.
